Why Millenials Are Uniquely Equipped to Handle The Current Economic Crisis

My generation is a lot tougher than the internet gives us credit for. We’re also a lot older than the internet thinks we are. Millennials aren’t self-entitled kids. Some of us have kids. Some of us have mortgages.

We’ve also seen some stuff in a pretty short period of time.

Y2K freaked a lot of our parents out. Our childhood was marked by 9/11. We’ve been engaged in overseas wars more years than we haven’t. COVID-19 isn’t even our first pandemic.

Entitled? Okay, Boomer.

The Washington Post recently performed an analysis noting that, in terms of economic odds, millennials are the unluckiest generation.

A lot of us graduated from college with degrees that cost considerably more than our parents’ degrees did….during the Great Recession.

I graduated in 2009, just after the pit of the recession, with a marketing degree. You know, one of the areas that usually see budget cuts first during a downturn. I was one of the really fortunate ones to be able to get a job with the degree I had my first year out of school. There was a lot of hard work on my end but luck still played a really significant role.

My generation started out adulthood in a terrible economic situation. Yet we still figured out how to get things done and change business as usual along the way….all while getting dunked on by older folks online a lot of the time.

My Generation Handles Change Better Than Most

The one thing millennials have done well is pivot. We have grown up not really knowing certainty. The status quo is something we’ve never really had the opportunity to embrace.

Which is going to help us now.

Our world is facing more uncertainty now than I can remember. This is going to be a tough season for a lot of us and a long road ahead, both from a health and economic perspective.

The forseeable future is going to involve a lot of change. Changing the way we do business. How we interact. Nobody knows what a post-COVID working world will look like exactly. We can all agree that it’s going to be different than it was a few months ago moving forward. For better and worse, the pandemic will change what our day-to-day life looks like in 2021 and beyond.

But millennials…we’re used to it. Constant change is second nature to us. We’ve had hurdles before and we can make it through this one as well.

We’re uniquely equipped for moments just like this one. We’ve had some practice along the way.